# In the windows status bar you will now see a pink colored feather with a green colored play button indicating Apache is up and running. Point your browser to http://localhost/ and you should get a page indicating its working.

# In the windows status bar you will now see a pink colored feather with a green colored play button indicating Apache is up and running. Point your browser to http://localhost/ and you should get a page indicating its working.

# Let us now go to the location where Apache is installed which commonly is at C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2 and go through the various directories

# Let us now go to the location where Apache is installed which commonly is at C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2 and go through the various directories

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## bin - contains the various binary files some of which are listed below. In order to access this applications, most of which are command based, we would need to add the path to the bin directory in our global PATH variable. To do that right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environments Variables and in the System Variables list locate and select the Variable PATH and click on Edit and add trailing a semi-colon followed by the absolute path to your bin directory. And click out from the System Properties dialogue by accepting all the way.

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## bin - contains the various binary files some of which are listed below. In order to access these applications, most of which are command based, we would need to add the path to the bin directory in our global PATH variable. To do that right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environments Variables and in the System Variables list locate and select the Variable PATH and click on Edit and add a trailing a semi-colon, if not already there, followed by the absolute path to your bin directory. And click out from the System Properties dialogue by accepting.

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### httpd.exe which is the Apache webserver itself, which is spawned to several child processes while running serving as many simultaneous incoming requests as required;

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### httpd.exe which is the Apache webserver itself, which is spawned to several child processes while serving as many simultaneous incoming clients requests as required by MaxClients directive;

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### ab.exe is the benchmarking tool that comes with Apache

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### ab.exe is a benchmarking tool that comes with Apache allowing you to see how well your application can perform per time unit

## conf - folder where various configuration files are located of which the following are of most interest in our case

## conf - folder where various configuration files are located of which the following are of most interest in our case

### httpd.conf - most of the server directives are located in this file and for easy access you should associate the .conf file type with a user friendly editor, i.e. anything other than the default Notepad.

### httpd.conf - most of the server directives are located in this file and for easy access you should associate the .conf file type with a user friendly editor, i.e. anything other than the default Notepad.

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### extra\httpd-vhosts.conf - contains directives that would allow you use your local server as virtual host. Simply put, during a development phase if you want to map the actual domain you are working for to your localhost, you would be able to do so by making minor tweaks in this file. We will discuss this in more detail below.

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### extra\httpd-vhosts.conf - contains directives that would allow you use your local server as virtual host, i.e. able to run several servers on your PC. One usage scenario is that during a development phase if you want to map the actual domain you are working for to your local copy, you would be able to do so by making minor tweaks in this file. We will discuss this in more detail below.

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## htdocs - the default web server root, this is where the http://localhost/ is mapped if you don't reconfigure it.

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## logs - access and error logs, when trying to address various issues related to your server or even your application

Overview

Here follows a brief overview of the steps to setup a Apache, PHP, MySQL in a Windows environment and also refer to various related tools to maintain and work with most of the tasks related to Joomla!.

In order to make the instruction clear and succinct, we will assume that wherever we are not stating any explicit instruction, you will let the default setup paths apply without modification.

Apache setup

Run the installer wizard and click through each step until you reach the Server Information window and give the options below respectively and in the given order in each of the fields, unless you have any specific requirements as to how your web server is setup:

localhost,

localhost and

admin@localhost

Click through the wizard which will install and start the apache web server as a windows service.

In the windows status bar you will now see a pink colored feather with a green colored play button indicating Apache is up and running. Point your browser to http://localhost/ and you should get a page indicating its working.

Let us now go to the location where Apache is installed which commonly is at C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2 and go through the various directories

bin - contains the various binary files some of which are listed below. In order to access these applications, most of which are command based, we would need to add the path to the bin directory in our global PATH variable. To do that right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environments Variables and in the System Variables list locate and select the Variable PATH and click on Edit and add a trailing a semi-colon, if not already there, followed by the absolute path to your bin directory. And click out from the System Properties dialogue by accepting.

httpd.exe which is the Apache webserver itself, which is spawned to several child processes while serving as many simultaneous incoming clients requests as required by MaxClients directive;

ab.exe is a benchmarking tool that comes with Apache allowing you to see how well your application can perform per time unit

conf - folder where various configuration files are located of which the following are of most interest in our case

httpd.conf - most of the server directives are located in this file and for easy access you should associate the .conf file type with a user friendly editor, i.e. anything other than the default Notepad.

extra\httpd-vhosts.conf - contains directives that would allow you use your local server as virtual host, i.e. able to run several servers on your PC. One usage scenario is that during a development phase if you want to map the actual domain you are working for to your local copy, you would be able to do so by making minor tweaks in this file. We will discuss this in more detail below.

htdocs - the default web server root, this is where the http://localhost/ is mapped if you don't reconfigure it.

logs - access and error logs, when trying to address various issues related to your server or even your application

Resources

Virtual hosting

PHP setup

Download PHP from http://windows.php.net/download/ and choose commonly VC6 x86 Thread Safe in Zip format. The various options have to do with how the PHP code base was compiled to binary and is probably nothing you should worry about for now.

Create a folder under your C:\Program Files\ (or wherever your program directory is located) a folder called PHP.

Locate your downloaded Zip file and move it to the newly created folder and unpack it directly into the folder.

Let us now add the PHP path to our global PATH variable by following the instruction above

Configuring PHP

The configuration amounts to editing the php.ini file. A sample file for different scenarios are already in your PHP folder. Let us rename php.ini-development to php.ini and open it in your favorite text editor. The common values to tweak are as follows and all of these variables are well documented in the php.ini file (please note that this is a server wide setting applying to all your projects):

max_execution_time - whenever you have scripts that run for too long and the server returns various unexpected results which you think is due to not being able to run through the whole process

memory_limit

error_reporting

display_errors

log_errors - a variable you would need to take note of in production scenarios

upload_tmp_dir

upload_max_filesize

extension_dir - in order to avoid complications we will point out the directory where the following extensions are located by uncommenting this variable and assign the absolute location of the folder, and the complete line should read as follows

extension_dir = "C:\Program Files\PHP\ext"

Dynamic extensions section contains various additional modules that you want to be loaded with, and the commented once are those that comes prepackaged with PHP and can be found in the ext directory in your PHP folder. If you want to activate any just remove the commenting as you should do with the following extensions:

php_curl.dll

php_gd2.dll

php_mbstring.dll

php_mysql.dll

php_mysqli.dll

php_pdo.dll

php_pdo_mysql.dll

php_xsl.dll

session.save_path

Configuring Apache to work with PHP

Now that we have configured PHP to work as we want it, lets go to Apache and do the same.

Open httpd.conf. and in the "Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support" section add the following directives (if you have located your PHP folder differently do make corresponding change for php5apache2_2.dll below):

In the DirectoryIndex add index.php as possible file to serve when directory is requested as follows

DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

.

At the end of the file add the following line which will point out where the php.ini file is located

PHPIniDir "C:/Program Files/PHP"

Restart and test PHP

As soon as you make any change to any of php.ini or httpd.conf or any other configuration files you need to restart Apache to see the actual effect of the changes. So lets now restart Apache by using the Apache Monitor tool you can find in your Windows status bar. Hopefully you are not prompted with any dialogues and the Apache Monitor continues to run green.

We will now make a test that PHP is working. Go to your web servers document root (in the default case C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs) and add a file called phpinfo.php with the following content:

<?php
phpinfo();
phpinfo(INFO_MODULES);
?>

This will render a page containing information about your PHP setup and about the various modules/extensions that are currently loaded. Point now your browser to http://localhost/phpinfo.php.